Last night saw the character generation session for my new old school campaign, Fellhold. Fellhold is a dungeon built into the living rock of Ashfell made up of ancient dwarven ruins, later additions by a foul cabal of sorcerors and their minions, and who knows what else that has burrowed its way in. The general feel is Germanic swords and sorcery (think if Robert E. Howard wrote Beowulf. Or, you know, the Frost Giant's Daughter works too). For visuals, think Paul Bonner's stuff for Riotminds.
The Game is using Swords and Wizardry White Box as it's core rules, though with some house rules. I originally planned to use the original three Little Brown Books (LBB's) of the actual white box edition of D&D, but even just going through character creation I discovered the advantages of S&W's streamlined and reorganized layouts. I will still be using the LBB's and the supplements for further material (there's a lot more about creating and stocking dungeons in "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures" for example).
We're playing the game over Google+ using hangouts, and soon to use Tabletop Forge program, which is already pretty cool, but looks like it will be really great as it gets developed after its successful Kickstarter campaign.
We're starting with a large group, six players and myself, and that brings us 4 fighting men, one of whom is a dwarf, a magic user, and a cleric. Dwarves are the only demi-humans in my campaign, and the number of evil humanoids will be extremely curtailed as well. We're sticking with the original three classes for now, but without a level cap on dwarves (they can still only be fighting men, however). Experience will be awarded for treasure spent and for killing monsters.
The most notable house rule so far is an adoption of Akratic Wizardry's Class Based Weapon Damage rather than either straight d6's across the board or Supplement I (and later D&D's) weapon based damage. This strikes me as a nice compromise that allows some differentiation between weapons, maintains fighting men's dominance in combat, but allows for some variety (such as allowing priests of Germanic gods the use of spears).
Hopefully regularly updates regarding this game will be a good spur to keeping up to date with this blog like I haven't for the last long while. I'll be posting summaries of sessions, notable house rules, and possibly some flavor stuff as it emerges through play.
Howdy, John, thanks very much for that link, as we add rules throughout the campaign, I'm sure that will come in handy,
ReplyDelete-Jeff